Yes, I’m still alive — I’ve just been overloaded with many projects recently so my blogging has been non-existent for the past 4 weeks. To be honest, it will probably be another 3 weeks before I get back on it as I’ll be going a way for a couple weeks in October.

However, that doesn’t mean I stopped reading! To make up for my absence, I’m including links to some key articles I’ve read in the past month so you can read them too. Hope you find them as interesting as I did!

When going through the process of adding / friending / following in social media, we often look for a common characteristic in our ‘friends’. These characteristics can be anything, from the love of tech, design, political affiliation or religion or any other type of culture. Why do we do this? It’s an attempt in the perpetual battle of finding the the signal amongst the noise, but on that journey, are we falling prey to too much narcissism?

After reading a recent post by Steven Hodson it made me think some more about the dreaded ‘echo chamber’ and its effects. In my opinion, the echo chamber is what you make it. Chances are you’ve isolated yourself on Twitter, or FriendFeed, or dare I say, even Facebook. This is understandably so, we have only so much time to waste spend online and it becomes increasingly difficult to keep up as technologies advance and networks grow.

Guy Kawasaki has recently come up with a new Alltop list of FriendFeeders called Frienderati. It’s very unclear as to how this list was generated; but one thing’s for sure — it wasn’t based on how active they are. Tony Hung doesn’t get it either.

FriendFeed is a great service for finding and sharing information and generating discussions. However, not all users are equal when it comes to their level of participation. I’ll show you what I mean by looking by looking at where comments are being made and what their objectives are.